MORE THAN 60 YEARS ago, a Polish Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin fled Nazi-occupied Europe, arrived in the U.S. and invented a word that he thought would change the world. Lemkin believed that genocide– from the Greek geno and the Latin cide –would carry such stigma that states would be loath to commit the crime–or to allow it. Lemkin, a haunted refugee and relentless lobbyist, managed to construct a lasting norm, as Webster’s and the Oxford English Dictionary granted his coinage lexicographic admission. In 1948 he went door to door at the new United Nations and persuaded representatives to endorse the Genocide Convention, the U.N.’s first human rights treaty, which committed signatories to “undertake to prevent and to punish” the monstrous horror. Since the invention of the word, however, a long line of Presidents have gone out of their way to avoid using it. Jimmy Carter resisted branding the Khmer Rouge with the term. Ronald Reagan avoided applying it to Saddam Hussein. The first President Bush refused to apply it to the Bosnian Serbs. And Bill Clinton skirted the label for Bosnia and Rwanda. State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly became the face of Clinton’s semantic wiggle when she tried to insist that, although hundreds of thousands of Rwandans had been butchered, only “acts” of genocide were occurring. Enter George W. Bush. At the U.N. last week, Bush spoke, unusually, of an ongoing “genocide” in Darfur, Sudan. The President was drawing on an investigation carried out by the State Department. When Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered a formal finding of genocide to Congress on Sept. 9, he was doing something no senior U.S. official had done before. “When we reviewed the evidence,” Powell said, “we concluded–I concluded–that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility and that genocide may still be occurring.” The Genocide Convention prohibits attempts to destroy “in whole or in part” national, ethnic or religious groups “as such.” Although Lemkin’s law grew directly out of the Holocaust, it did not define genocide as the attempted extermination of an entire group. Lemkin, who lost 49 members of his family, including his parents, to the Final Solution, knew that if extermination were the threshold for a response, action would inevitably come too late. The horrors in Darfur are just what Lemkin had in mind. Sudan’s government and its Janjaweed militias are systematically expelling Darfur’s non-Arab population, murdering tens of thousands and permitting widespread gang rape–to make what they say will be lighter-skinned babies and ensure that the non-Arab tribes will be too degraded to return to their homes. The U.S. use of the G word has done little more than set off a new round of bureaucratic shuffling. Some who recall the Holocaust and Rwanda don’t believe Darfur measures up. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has said he will appoint a commission to investigate the charges. European ministers, who have been reluctant even to acknowledge ethnic cleansing, are scrambling to draft legal briefs. The Arab League and Sudan have scoffed at the U.S. claim, charging Bush with having an anti-Islamic agenda. Meanwhile, the killings, rapes and torchings continue.
